NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO, April 17 (Reuters) - Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is planning to conduct its first wave of sweeping layoffs scheduled for this year on May 20. Sources familiar with the matter indicate that in this initial round, the company will lay off approximately 10% of its global workforce, amounting to nearly 8,000 employees.
Furthermore, the company is planning additional layoffs in the second half of the year, though the specific date and scale of these cuts have yet to be finalized. It is understood that executives may adjust these layoff plans based on observed developments in artificial intelligence capabilities. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is investing hundreds of billions of dollars to dramatically reshape the company's inner workings around AI technology.
As part of this push, Meta has reorganized teams within its Reality Labs division and transferred engineers to a new "Applied AI" organization. This group is tasked with accelerating the development of AI agents capable of autonomously writing code and executing complex tasks.